Here’s a crazy reason your article did not mention for including an acknowledgment at the end of your novel: to acknowledge. If there is some kind of old-fashioned virtue in concealing one’s debt to and gratitude for the hard work of others, it’s difficult for me to see where itlies.

But of course Chabon approves of the public airing of private gratitude. He’s married, after all, to novelist Ayelet Waldman, who famously published a certain delightful bit in a March 2005 “Modern Love” column. What did she have tosay?

I am the only woman in Mommy and Me who seems to be, well, getting any. This could fill me with smug well-being. I could sit in the room and gloat over my wonderful marriage. I could think about how our sex life — always vital, even torrid — is more exciting and imaginative now than it was when we first met. I could check my watch to see if I have time to stop at Good Vibrations to see if they have any exciting new toys. I could even gaze pityingly at the other mothers in the group, wishing that they too could experience a love as deep as myown.

You know what they say. It’s not the size of the acknowledgments, it’s the — well, maybe it is the size of theacknowledgments.